On 8 Oct 2008, at 03:51, Walter Bender wrote: > The bottom line is that, at least as far as the XO is concerned (and > other machines with limited memory and no swap) the list of activities > to tab through, with or without the Journal, is going to be a short > list, so is it really such a pressing issue?
For tabbing, I think one frustration here is the current issue with tabbing where the delay is way too short before an Activity you're tabbing past is pulled into focus (I'd argue there should be no auto delay focus, only focus when alt key is lifted, allowing you to easily skip items in the stack). Currently in 8.2, accidentally tabbing the 'wrong way' through the active instances on the XO and getting shown the wrong thing (usually Journal given only having a few activities running) is painful enough time wise to distract you from whatever goal you had in mind. Example: TurtleArt, and 2 x ImageViewers showing some screen shots of different brick code you want to reference. Tabbing between TurtleArt and the images you trying to reference is constantly intruded upon by the redraw, and update of Journal – if you're just mucking around, it's less of a pain, but if you're actually trying to 'get stuff done' it can get quite annoying pretty quickly. > I'd love the same passion developed to some of the issues/topics that > impact the learning. How can we make the Journal better, regardless of > how we open it and regardless of whether we consider it an activity or > part of Sugar core? I guess most interested parties on the sugar list are more technical than pedagogical types. Both my parents were teachers, and when computers started to make their way into some of their lessons/labs, way back when, I seem to remember they would come home somewhat bemused, having been handed boxes of cables and computer kit. As an ~11yr old I would set it up, get things going, and show them how to load-up and use the software. It's an interesting generational shift, I wonder what new idea is going to come along and be so far from our expectations that we'll be too inflexible as adults to really pick it up well (here already?). Maybe it's just a personality trait thing and not age at all; I guess I know enough people my age who I wouldn't trust to safely 'shut down' an operating system without being given a lesson or two first ;-) OK. Journal, and its related use, have some UI improvement possibilities that could be targeted (and I think a few might be targeted already for work), without having to solve the big 'impact on learning' type wider research/study goals. Some things that come to mind just now (in no special order and I'm sure most have been discussed already at some point): - Sort view by creation date, not just by last modification date. Currently when you resume something, even just to take a look, it pulls it out of the time context of other entries it was created alongside. One click, and last weeks essays narrative/reflection is lost (the photos you took, the chat discussions you had with classmates, the audio you recorded, the picture you painted etc). - Filter view for starred items only, a single click way to quickly hide the unwanted. - Improve the 'Anything' pop-up UI. It takes me about 4-5sec of scrolling to get to the bottom of the Activity and mime file type list. And worse, if you do scroll way down, it takes just as long to get the Journal back to default after your search. I guess ideally this would become a custom palette grid of some kind, perhaps with just icons and mouse over text for the full names to save space. Another option could be for a short list of the most frequently used N activities (or the current Home view favourites), and then a 'more...' end item that would reveal a large slide-out, below toolbar dialogue with all installed activities and file types listed. Actually, you could cut to the chase and have an 'Anything' button that just triggers a slide down alert panel with all installed activities. - Realtime scrolling so you can just grab, drag, and look as it goes past. Currently, if what I'm after is not on the first page, and I think it's more than a page or two away, it might as well be infinitely far away. It's then time to try and remember the activity object type, or some text/metadata and start typing until it (hopefully) makes it onto page one. - Text search works reasonably well for me, but as mentioned already, some kind of slide-out alert to prompt for an Activity title, tags, star, possibly description (though I can't say I've ever meaningfully used the description field) would make a large difference in Journal entry quality. Think the dialogue will need to auto countdown and dismiss with sensible default values where ever possible. This feature could be really tough to make work without annoying everyone. Perhaps could also do with a "don't keep" button there for quick dismissal of unwanted work when stopping. - Inline, or same context detail view. Switching content to get to the detail view, and then having to switch back again seems to put the details too far out of normal use/view. --Gary _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
